Oscar's working on this question: What is the difference between a cake baked without oil and a cake baked with oil?
The young investigator in the "lab."
Not to be confused with what's behind him, i.e., the "kitchen." Note French toast in progress.
Nor with the opposite side of the counter, i.e., the "Pokémon bench."
Weighing an egg in grams on my kitchen scale.
The worksheet we developed for making sure that each small cake contains the same amount of egg. (This was really, really fun for me to lead him through on Monday when we prepared for the lab). Complete with hands-on lesson in Why We Must Align Digits Neatly In Our Lab Notebook Lest We Make Simple Addition Mistakes. Woo-hoo!
Control cake batter on the right. Test cake batter (sans cooking oil) on the left.
One does not "make mistakes" in the lab so much as one Deviates From The Experimental Procedure. This is not necessarily Ruining The Experiment, as long as you document what you did.
Visual observations of the freshly baked cake. Note to anyone who might be concerned about following standard laboratory kitchen procedure: They were done at about the same time, so we managed both to bake them for the same amount of time AND to bake them to the same doneness. All controversy related to which of these is more appropriate is thus, for the moment, moot.
Finally: the focus group test. (It's not double-blind. It's not even single-blind. I wasn't looking when it started).
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